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What am I doing wrong?

I am trying to do my own SEO for my small photography business. I have been with SEOMOZ for about a week now. My ranking before was about the 4th page for "Houston Wedding Photographer"

I have found places to add my link for back-links. I fixed the duplicate page content errors... I had Google re-crawl my site the other day because I felt like I had done a significant job improving the rank. My website has now slipped to the 5th page.

9 Responses

It can take a while for a site to settle into its place in the rankings. Are you logged out, set as being in Houston, etc when you're doing your searches? I logged out and went into private browsing and didn't see your site at all in the rankings.

Does WMT say that it's indexed all of your pages? I'm seeing 39 pages and quite a lot more images. While you're at it, you might as well submit your sitemap to Bing.

Fwiw, you appear to have 8 H1 tags on your homepage. Generally, you want to have just one if you can help it. Also, I don't see a canonical tag, which you might want to put in place, and you're not rewriting your URLs. If I type photogbykelly.com into my address bar, your site returns photogbykelly.com. If I type www.photogbykelly.com, your site returns www.photogbykelly.com. You should be rewriting your URLs to either the www or non-www version so that, for example, I get back www.photogbykelly.com when I only type in photogbykelly.com.

The last few things that come to mind are that... you're using meta keywords on your pages. Those don't help your rankings, but they can harm your rankings if you appear to be keyword stuffing. On your homepage, it looks like stuffing. And, you have some odd pages like photogbykelly.com/backlinks.html that make it look like maybe you're reciprocal linking or something like that?

I log out to see where I am listed, if I don't, the top 4 to 5 posts in the search are from either my Google places reviews or my Google Page.

Can you explain the rewriting URL's part? How do I fix that? Is that part of the coding at the top (before the <head>)?

I know that Keywords can help. I drastically reduced them (there are now only 4 (or 9 if you break up each word) I thought having a few would still be okay. I looked at the top listed sites and they are using their keywords to repeat "Houston wedding photographer" over and over and over again... yet they are listed at the top?

As far as rewriting goes, you want to pick one version of your site, either www or non-www, and stick with that so that, when you get links, they point to the correct address. When you don't rewrite your URLs, it looks to search engines like there are actually 2 websites, the www version and non-www version, that display duplicate content. I'm guessing that you selected the www version in Google Webmaster Tools because that is the only one it displays. Regarding fixing it, your domain registrar and host will sometimes have a simple setting for that actually so that you don't have to do a mod_rewrite. If you don't find anything with your registrar/host about it, you might be best served by posting a new question here about it.

Regarding keywords, that's a tough one, but like many SEO issues, we'd like to think the rules are hard and fast, but they're not. You're not supposed to be able to get by with keyword stuffing – as your competitors apparently are – but it happens. There might be a newer version of this video, but in 2009, Matt Cutts talked about the fact that Google doesn't use keywords as a search ranking factor.

The main thing holding you back(and every other photographer I ever worked with) is content. Your site has plenty of beautiful images, but you have almost no real content/words on your site.

Google does not see images at all. They will see alt tags if you add that to the code of your images.

Also there are some real issues with the code of your site. I would highly encourage you to learn a little more about how your site is built. Theres several sections on your site that use blank heading tags(h1, h2, h3) to space things out. Heading tags are a key indicator to Google about what your page is about. Using them to create spacers could be a real problem.

Last look at who is ranking number 1 for your key word "Houston Wedding Photographers".

All of the results at the top are actually Google Places listings and not just websites. Maybe the key to more business is as simple as creating a Google Places listing!

While you're link building, I would also check out your local directories and make sure that your address/link/phone number is updated on all of them. You can check out GetListed.org... an SEOMoz bought company to see if your information is accurate everywhere.

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